


One of Us

by CheshireMoon



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Croatoan/Endverse, Croatoans, Endverse, Gen, Supernatural Endverse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 10:17:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 780
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2064285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CheshireMoon/pseuds/CheshireMoon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If God had a name, what would it be?<br/>And would you call it to his face,<br/>If you were faced with Him in all His glory?<br/>What would you ask if you had just one question?</p><p>-"One of Us" ~ Joan Osborne</p>
            </blockquote>





	One of Us

**_C R O A T O A N_ **

_Croatoan._

The word had come to completely dominate Chuck Shurley’s and all his friends’ lives. Weapons, clothes, vehicles, toilet paper… Every day was a struggle to find the necessities of life, and every night was spent in various hazes of tears, alcohol or fear. Sometimes a mixture of all three. More and more often, people were succumbing to the cruelties of what the world had become. It was hideous, it was frightening, it was harrowing, and there was absolutely nothing that any of them could do except continue to fight as hard as they could.

Chuck sat on the edge of his bunk, head in his hands, focusing on breathing as evenly as he could. Daytime… He could handle the daylight. He could smile and be the goofy comic relief and block the misery out. He could fight alongside Dean and Castiel and the rest of the camp, pretend to be a writer-turned-soldier.

Nighttime, however… Nighttime was different. It was harder. When the sun went down, something shifted. Grown men and women with hardened hearts and broken souls found themselves feeling like children, scared and lonely and unable to hold onto their courage. Chuck could block it out during the day. He could ignore the mental anguish that the men and women of Camp Chitaqua locked up inside.   
But at night, Chuck Shurely stopped trying. He let the wall that he kept carefully guarded during the day fall down. Every night he let it crumble. He let the misery, the fear, the pain and the heartache flood into him. He sat there, trying not to succumb to it.

"God doesn’t cry," he whispered to himself over and over again. "God loves his children, God doesn’t cry, God feels their pain and tries to take it away." He kept repeating the words to himself, more trying to convince himself of their empty truth than anything else. "God shouldn’t cry," he said in a shaky voice, forcing back the burning in the corners of his vessel’s eyes.

Drunken and slurred voices, sobbing voices, broken voices, wrathful voices. They were all cursing his name. They were all calling him coward and fool, spitting curses at his name in every way their minds could think of, and instead of blocking it out, he tried to listen to every one. It was the price of his failure, the punishment he inflicted on himself night after night for not being there for his children. He could see their faces and hear their hearts beating and see their souls shining dimly. He closed himself off from them during the day, but at night… At night he let them in.

When the sun was shining, he watched only one soul. The one soul that he kept closest to, the one soul that became dimmer and dimmer with each passing day. Every day, as he stood by his side, Chuck watched Dean Winchester’s soul waver, not with fear, but with rage and with hatred. The once beautiful soul was marred almost beyond recognition by the horrors that Dean had seen, and Chuck blamed himself.

He blamed himself for Dean’s pain as much as he blamed himself for Castiel Fall. Once one of the most beautiful, glorious and faithful angels he’d ever created, Castiel had Fallen into being a mere shell of what he once was. He was empty, kept himself going through drugs and through sex. He smiled and joked, but Chuck knew. He knew that Castiel still felt a dull ache where his wings once were. Chuck knew that Castiel still felt entirely too small, entirely too contained in the body he’d become trapped in. His true form had died, but Chuck knew that Castiel still sometimes pined for the sheer holy power of it. The empty ex-angel weighed on him nearly as much as his Broken Righteous Man.

"God shouldn’t cry," Chuck whispered again to himself, voice and throat thick as tears began to streak down his rough, dirty cheek. He lowered his hand, looking around at the other bunks around him.

_"Fuck you, God!"_

_"How could you abandon us?"_

_"Where are you?"_

_"Why the fuck did you leave us here to die?"_

_"Damn you, God. Damn you to Hell, you coward."_

_"Father, where are you?"_

The curses and questions never ended, and Chuck would never stop them. He stifled a sob into his hands, immersing himself fully in the pain of his abandoned children, longing to scream,  _"Here I am, my Children! Here I am! I’m so sorry. I am so, so sorry."_

And so God cried for the souls that he would never and could never save.


End file.
